Chapter 15: Do Not Grieve

Sunrise came, but Caelym didn’t.

As the sun continued its upward climb, the tension in the room rose along with it. Ossiam’s resentment that Olyrrwd, as the shrine’s chief healer, was the only one of them to have free access to the women’s quarters slipped out when he broke the meditative silence with the grumble, “You’re the physician—why don’t you go and ask when we may expect him?”

While his tone was unnecessarily abrasive, Herrwn thought, in all fairness, that Ossiam had a point. In any case, it did nothing to improve the general mood when Olyrrwd snapped back, “You’re the oracle—why don’t you gut a toad and tell us how much longer we need to wait?”

Not wanting the arrival of Caelendra’s son to be marred by petty squabbling, Herrwn was on the verge of admonishing both men when the sound of scuffing came from the hallway and a shrill child’s voice screamed, “I don’t want to be a Druid! Druids are stupid! I hate Druids!”

“Shhh!” a woman’s voice responded. “You mustn’t say that! They’ll hear you.”

Startled, Herrwn, with Olyrrwd and Ossiam at his heels, hurried to the doors and opened them to see a disheveled servant clutching a struggling boy, dressed only in his nightshirt, who was hitting her with two parts of a torn toy, sending bits of stuffing flying into the air.

Before Herrwn could think of something soothing to say to calm the distraught child and coax him into the room, Ossiam lunged forward, grabbed the back of the boy’s collar, wrenched him away from his nurse, and lifted him up to dangle at arm’s length.

“Silence!” he screamed at the servant, who’d fallen, groveling, to the floor, and begun pleading with him not to turn her or the poor child into anything awful.

“And you.” He shook the twisting, flailing boy so that he began to swing back and forth. “How dare you behave like the spawn of a Saxon she-beast? You are a disgrace to the goddess who died to give you life! You are a disgrace to—”

Ossiam’s tirade was cut short when a surprisingly well-aimed thrust of the boy’s bare foot struck him squarely in the stomach. Doubling over, he lost his grip on the thrashing youngster, who, still kicking his feet after falling to the floor, propelled himself backward through the door and across the classroom floor to the far wall, all the while emitting shrieks that were, fortunately, no longer coherent, or else Ossiam would no doubt have been cursed throughout his life and forever after.

This was no way to start the formal education of Caelendra’s only child—and, determined to restore order, Herrwn, too, raised his voice.

“Ossiam, that will do!”

Whether because he was submitting to Herrwn’s authority or was too preoccupied with trying to catch his breath to move, Ossiam remained where he was as Herrwn and Olyrrwd hurried over to where Caelym had wedged himself behind a fallen chair and was glaring out from between its legs.

Although he had never been faced with anything like this before, Herrwn felt instinctively that any move on his part to pry Caelym out from behind his barricade would only make matters worse, so instead he began the welcoming speech he had planned, amending its opening lines to acknowledge the boy’s obvious distress.

“Do not grieve for the life you leave behind, my child, but rejoice for the one which lies before you now that you have crossed the threshold into this hallowed place of learning, where, with diligence on your part and devotion on ours, you will be endowed with all the wisdom that has been passed down to us from the ages so that someday, when you have learned all that we have to teach you, you will be ready to enter the highest ranks of our sacred order.”

Instead of the hoped-for calming effect, Herrwn’s greeting only served to drive Caelym farther back behind the upturned chair. Clutching the remnants of his toy to his heaving chest, he pressed back against the wall, his knees drawn up and his dark, defiant eyes glittering with unshed tears.

At a loss for what to do next, Herrwn was relieved to step aside when Olyrrwd elbowed past him, muttering, “My turn.”

Olyrrwd squatted down in front of Caelym, just out of kicking range, so that the two were eye level with each other, and said, “Your horse is hurt. How did it happen?”

At those words, spoken in the calmly concerned voice that Olyrrwd used in his healing chambers, Caelym’s defiance dissolved into a flood of recriminations.

Herrwn presumed the servant, who was still groveling and whimpering in the doorway, had a real name, but it was usual for the children’s nurses to be called “Nonna,” and that was the name Caelym used as he pushed the chair aside and blurted out, “Nonna said that I had to go and learn to be a Druid and I couldn’t ever come back! But Whinnie didn’t want to go! He was hiding under the bed, and I was getting him!”

Stopping to draw in a long, shuddering breath, Caelym turned a baleful glare toward the door, where his nurse was now sitting up and wiping her eyes.

Olyrrwd nodded thoughtfully. “And then?”

“And then Nonna said I had to stop playing and hurry! But I wasn’t playing! Whinnie was stuck! And then Nonna said to come or I couldn’t learn to be a Druid! But I told her I don’t want to be a Druid! But she said I had to, so come now! And then she said I was too old to play with Whinnie, and I should leave him for the new baby! But Whinnie doesn’t like babies! And I told him he had to come, and I pulled him and I pulled him and … and … he came apart!”

At this, Caelym’s voice rose to a howl of rage and remorse that continued for so long Herrwn had to wonder whether the boy would ever take another breath. When he finally did, Olyrrwd took advantage of the moment to put out his hand with his palm up and said, “May I see?”

Caelym held the remains of his toy tighter.

Olyrrwd kept his hand out. “I am a healer and it is my job to tend to those who are ill or injured, but if I am to help, I must first look to see what is wrong.”

Herrwn was no healer but even he could see “what was wrong” was that the toy was torn in two and had lost almost all of its stuffing. Olyrrwd, however, gave no sign that he was less serious about this than about any other injured patient.

Caelym took another long, shaky breath. “Promise you’ll give him back!”

“I promise.”

Drawing in his lower lip and clenching it between his teeth, Caelym held out the bigger piece of the toy that he had gripped in his right hand and then, slowly, one finger at a time, opened his left fist and held out the rest.

Olyrrwd nodded twice, first in acknowledgment of Caelym’s concession and then to dismiss the nurse, who scrambled to her feet and ran off. He then took the two parts of the torn toy and put them together, first one way, then another, apparently weighing its chances for recovery.

Caelym watched, his lower lip quivering. “Can you …?”

The question came out halfway between a question and a sob.

“I can heal him, but I will need you to be my assistant.”

With that, Olyrrwd handed both pieces of the toy back to Caelym, picked up the overturned chair, and set it right side up at the table where he’d left his healer’s satchel. Caelym followed after him, climbed onto the chair, and wiped his nose with the smaller piece of the rag toy as Olyrrwd took his own seat and began to pull the things he used for real wounds out of the bag.

He threaded a needle with what Herrwn knew to be his best gut suture and held it up, looking at Caelym.

“Will it hurt?” the boy whispered.

“Perhaps, just a little, so you must hold him very still and tell him to be brave.”

Bracing his elbows on the table, Caelym held the horse’s head in his hands and whispered in its remaining ear, “Be brave,” and “Don’t cry,” and “It will only hurt a little,” while Olyrrwd stitched it together, restuffing it with the sheep’s wool he kept for sopping up blood or purulence from draining sores as he went so it gradually took the shape of a sturdy little pony that looked remarkably perky given all it had been through.

After tying off the thread, Olyrrwd handed the little horse back to Caelym, who hugged it in a grasp that would have suffocated a real pet and looked at Olyrrwd with worshipful awe.

Feeling it incumbent upon himself to instill good manners in his new pupil, Herrwn cleared his throat and prompted, “Now, what do you say?”

“Thank you” was, of course, the response he was looking for, but Caelym drew his lip in and seemed to ponder deeply, looking first at Olyrrwd, then down at the toy horse, and then back at Olyrrwd, before answering, “You can play with him.” He held the horse out as he added gravely, “But you have to give him back.”

Olyrrwd somehow kept from smiling as he took the toy and answered just as gravely, “Thank you, I will.” Then he did smile—in fact, beamed—and said, “My name is Olyrrwd. What’s yours?”

Caelym beamed back and said, “Caelym”—and, in his next breath, pelleted Olyrrwd with a volley of questions:

“Do all real animals have blood?”

“Why do birds get to fly, and we don’t?”

“Can people eat worms?”

“What is poo-poo made of?”

An offended “humph” was the first audible sound to come from Ossiam since he’d had the wind kicked out of him. Drawing himself up to his full height, he announced that he was going to his tower to propitiate the spirits and to divine how best to make amends for Caelym’s transgressions. Without waiting for any response, he swept out of the room, his robes billowing behind him.

Olyrrwd, who didn’t pay much attention to Ossiam’s pronouncements anyway, began to answer each of Caelym’s questions in turn. He had just reached the one about poo-poo when a servant rushed into the classroom gasping that there’d been an accident at the archery practice.

Pausing just long enough to set the toy horse down, pat its head, and tell it not to hide under any more beds, Olyrrwd took up his leather bag and rushed off, leaving Herrwn alone with Caelym.